It’s still the holiday season. Which is why we’re still at the breakfast table, reading, blogging, even though it’s nearly 13:00. Miles Davis still playing somewhere.
I guess the reason I don’t understand Reddit is that every question has thirty answers or more, and nobody seems to know each other. Is there a sense of community and I just don’t see it? Perhaps I’m growing old and cannot imagine how to make connections. If you’re a regular Reddit user: how does it work for you? Have you made friends, there? Do you recognise each other?
Anyway, I sometimes go to Reddit, mostly for a few minutes of looking at the artwork, I guess. I’m on the following subreddits: /r/AskGameMasters/ /r/collapsademic/ /r/DMAcademy/ /r/DnD/ /r/DnDBehindTheScreen/ /r/DungeonWorld/ /r/ImaginaryLandscapes/ /r/ImaginaryMonsters/ /r/ImaginarySliceOfLife/ /r/LabyrinthLord/ /r/mapmaking/ /r/modnews/ /r/oldmaps/ /r/osr/ /r/papertowns/ /r/rpg/ /r/rpg_generators/ /r/science/ /r/theflowerdistrict/ /r/traveller/ /r/YoonSuin/ – anything else you’d recommend?
☯ Today somebody asked: “What is Old School Essentials good for other than dungeon crawling/how to make running dungeons fun?”
I prefer wilderness exploration, myself. Pick a spot to build a castle and automatically the campaign is about collecting those 75,000gp and protecting the building site, getting rid of nearby monsters, diplomatic missions to neighbouring settlements, maybe also a dungeon or two, and so on. As for making dungeons fun: in my games they’re the most fun when there are multiple factions and the players must navigate the social landscape as well as the physical landscape. Talk to people for safe passage. Talk to people to ally against a common foe. Talk to people for shelter and supplies. Perhaps that’s coloured by my megadungeon mindset.
Anyway: this is what I’d use for a mini-setting: random alpine region using Hex Describe. Click the Submit button at the bottom and wait for half a minute. Bam! Instant campaign.
☯ Somebody else asked for ideas about a party travelling through a deception-themed hell to Ribcage on a ship, and on to Sigil. “My player are in Hell and headed to Sigil, help!”
I find the old material not dense enough for my taste. If you need something fast, I’d say decide whether you want to use the factions (I love them), pick one, read up on their headquarter, prepare a few situations in that headquarter, two or three characters, a mission to retrieve a person or object for them from somewhere else in the multiverse, a conflict with another faction, prepare two or three characters of the other faction, a building that doesn’t require too much prep, like an inn, a temple… and you should be good to go. One way to get started with this sort of thinking would be the adventure The Eternal Boundary.
As for Deception, I’d suggest a fake entrance to Ribcage! A fantastic shortcut. All they need to do is leave their ship behind… and then there could be a settlement where almost everybody is a Doppelgänger, nobody is real, and the ruling class are foppish noble ghouls, or vampires. Start with a banquet, the food is foul but made to look nice; the city does in fact guard a gate, but it actually leads deeper into hell. If you want to push it, make the players meet a friendly party of adventurers that fell for it all as they reach fake Ribcage. These happy friends will share bread and salt, tell tall tales and go through the gate. Then the party has the banquet, discovers the truth (or not), and either follows the others through the gate unwittingly, or decides to go after them in order to rescue them.
☯ Somebody else asked for ideas regarding a golem campaign where players can modify the bodies of their characters, listing some modifications they had thought of. “The main thing I’m worried about, actually, is that some of these aren’t as good as others.”
All I can say is that in one of my campaigns we had some meat magic going on: some grey elves knew a grafting spell to attack limbs to a body. Basically if you can’t use restoration to regrow a limb, you can use that (lower level) graft spell. So then there was a problem: what if you attach dragon wings to your back? Of course it works, but I ruled that your brain still was equipped to only handle 4 body parts so in an emergency, roll some dice to see if you can control your body: if you have 6 limbs instead of the natural 4, there’s just a 4 in 6 chance for your body to work as intended in an emergency.
But then again, I never did force my player to roll that die. It just never came up. If they aren’t flying while fighting, no problem.
Another solution for the natural weapon limbs would be to rule that if you get limbs that act as natural weapons, you can’t wield weapons made for human hands. Then players might want an appropriately crafted giant spear or whatever, and that’s fine, too: getting it can be a little adventure, and then it’s like a unique little magic item. Works for me.
#RPG #Old School
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To answer your question, I feel that Reddit’s communities are a lot more focused on the overall community and its feel than the individuals in it. I’d wager a guess that most Redditors couldn’t give a single username they’d recognize at site, apart from joke bot accounts or maybe a celebrity that uses Reddit. They added a friend feature a few years ago and every comment on the announcement post was “no one is ever going to use this”.
But that impersonality is what draws me to it over other social media. I don’t *want* to make connections on Reddit, because that stresses me out. The internet is what I go to in my spare time, so making connections through social media means I feel like I have to maintain them when I should be relaxing. If I unfollow an acquaintance on Twitter who doesn’t have a ton of followers, they’ll notice, but I can unsubscribe from a subreddit without fear. Everything posted on Facebook has to be checked against what my friends and family will think of it, but on Reddit, all but the absolute worst posts will be completely forgotten by everyone who downvotes or comments negatively within a few hours.
Reddit occupies the perfect space for me because small subreddits (which can still be pretty large, just not with millions of members) have a distinct feel that I can recognize and identify with, without either being so large that it loses its identity or so personal that I feel like I have to constantly maintain my image. I’ve made a few friends online, but always by starting conversations through direct messages and transitioning away from the site I found them on. I’d much rather socialize in person or an online format that’s more formalized, where there’s a clear start and end and I’m not tied to an endless treadmill of maintaining appearances or feeling guilty because I’m letting them slip. That’s what draws me to blogs, too - I can read as much as I want from someone I find interesting but never feel like I *have* to comment if I have nothing interesting to say in return.
– Malcolm 2021-12-26 19:45 UTC
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An interesting perspective. Thanks! I hear you with regards to friends and family following me on social media. 🙂
– Alex 2021-12-26 20:28 UTC
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I am with you about r/. /r/adnd but yeah that will not change your mind. Its not the worst social media its just not a community and thinking and calling them that destroys society
That is a larger topic that applies to more granted
– Oliver 2021-12-26 21:20 UTC
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/r/adnd, /r/mothershiprpg /r/icrpg /r/onepagedungeon /r/bfrpg /r/lotfp /r/starwarsd6 /r/travellerrpg /r/callofcuthulu /r/harn /r/swn /r/glog /r/whitehack /r/warhammerfantasyrpg /r/d100
Are ones I check every couple months
– Jerry S 2021-12-26 21:21 UTC
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Thanks!
– Alex 2021-12-26 23:06 UTC
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@Oliver I’m not sure what else you would call a subreddit, other than a community. It’s true that there isn’t a personal connection between individuals but there are clear traits that arise as a whole, and while things remain faceless, it’s still a group of people interacting around a common interest - a community. I’m not sure how saying that destroys society, either.
– Malcolm 2021-12-27 22:58 UTC
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I got an interesting reply on Mastodon by @malin:
I don’t see much sense of community, except perhaps in small things, like a common interest and a common language.
In a way, that would make a subreddit more alike to a subculture. You don’t really know all the metalheads or punks in your area, but you know the signs and norms, the shorthands and the expectations.
I remember a similar statement on Google+, a long time ago. Somebody said that other people suffered from the delusion that all Google+ users shared some set of values (e.g. in politics) when this wasn’t true at all. I’d say an exchange where something like that is said would be one where people don’t share the definition of “community”. For some, it would be enough to share the signs and norms, for others it would have to be something more, a sort of moral understanding (of what is right and wrong, on politics, or friendship) on top of everything else.
That would also reflect my own confusion as I’m seeing people interacting without entering into relationships. (Perhaps also coloured by me reading Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years right now!)
– Alex 2021-12-28 14:11 UTC
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Reddit is my favorite of the big social media sites precisely because you do not go there to make friends I don’t know anyone by name on reddit. I like that you follow topics instead of people. If I have a cool thing I want to share on twitter I can’t get traction cause I don’t know anyone. But on reddit I just have to post to the right subreddit and no one really cares to wonder who I am or follow me, they just go “cool nice project dude” and move on with their days. I like that cause I don’t have to maintain relationships but i can show people stuff I want the world to know about.
– b0b 2021-12-29 01:58 UTC
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I’m with bob and Malcolm here. One reason why I like Reddit is that I’m not a “social” guy: I don’t want to make connections, I don’t care much about individuals there (though it’s always nice to see authors participate in their game’s sub); I care about discussions, topics, ideas, info.
On Reddit, threads are self-contained and easy to find, follow, and participate in (even with just an upvote here and there), unlike in other places like Discord - for example - where discussion are either caught in the moment or irremediably lost, drowned by the noise of a myriad other overlapping threads.
As for more subreddit suggestions, aside from ones from your list and some other individual games/systems, I follow BehindTheTables, Fkr, Solo_Roleplaying.
– emarsk 2021-12-29 12:51 UTC